+3 Interview: Gobland for the Goblins!

“Gobland is much larger and more complex than anything we’ve ever attempted before!”

WHO: James Beagon, Director & Writer

WHAT:“Choices always matter. Play the video game and save Gobland! Magic, goblins and gaming combine in this fantasy choose-your-own-adventure show from award-winning writer James Beagon. Will Spot be a fighter, a rogue or a wizard? Duel the Emperor, fool the Mole Queen or compete in the Gnomish Bake Off? In this dark fantasy game world, we invite everyone to join the quest and make their own mark on history. With the Goblin Empire hanging in the balance, decisions are never as easy as they seem.”

This is the fourth show produced by Aulos Productions at the Edinburgh Fringe, but our first Children’s Show. In recent years, we’ve produced “First Class”, “Women of the Mourning Fields” and “Lest We Forget” so Gobland marks something quite new for us.

For me personally, it’s the fifth show I’ve had presented at the Fringe and it’s my seventh Fringe in total as a performer or production team member. Apparently the obsession isn’t going away any time soon!

Tell us about your show.

I founded Aulos Productions in 2014 as a means to continue producing & directing my own written work after graduation. Since then, Aulos has been a regular at both the Edinburgh & Buxton Fringe Festivals, where we’ve won and been nominated for several awards in the past.

This year, we didn’t go to Buxton as Gobland is much larger and more complex than anything we’ve ever attempted before! It’s a choose-your-own-adventure story, so from the beginning Gobland was already a massive challenge for me to even write. From a rehearsal perspective, it’s even more complex as the actors have to take onboard all the different possible directions that the play could take.

There’s the chance that some of the scenes we’ve spent months working on never get picked or found. That’s just how it goes. But after months of rehearsal, this amount of detail absolutely works in Gobland‘s favour. There’s a decent amount of improv involved in the production as well, meaning that we’ll never have exactly the same show twice.

As we missed Buxton this year, Gobland will be premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe this time around. After Edinburgh, who knows? We’re an Edinburgh-based company, so the Fringe is the highlight of our year but we have considered taking it to local schools and such in the future.

What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?

Our friends at “Some Kind of Theatre” are tackling Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” with a pirate theme over at Black Market. We tackled Caesar with a football theme back in March 2016 and we’re really excited to see their unique take on it.

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